Have you ever gone through your basement or attic and found something you forgot you ever had? Maybe sifted through the junk drawer and found five pairsof scissors? Bought a new light bulb for the bathroom just to discover that you had three in the back of the broom closet?

For the past 10 months, the Utica City School District has been doing just that, inventorying what it has, selling what it’s had forever and will never use again, and simply getting organized. Much of this is taking place in the shop, a building the district owns on Elizabeth Street that is part maintenance building, part workshop, part warehouse and part garage.

School board President Chris Salatino said the changes came with the current board, which has been paying more attention to day-to-day expenses, but it’s something he has wanted changed since he joined the board almost four years ago.

“A $136 million budget and no inventory controls?” he asked, shaking his head. “Even when we were audited, the state noticed that.”

Salatino said it was a matter of different departments managing their own inventory and spending only what they were allocated.

“Now we’re watching what we’re buying,” Salatino said.

In October, the school board voted to replace a vacant masonry position with a stock keeper who will oversee everything that comes in and goes out to the schools, and develop a computerized system of tracking everything.

Interviews for the new position are complete, and the board will vote on the final candidate in January. The entry-level position will pay between $27,000 and $40,000 per year, district officials said.

Among the other changes: The warehouse doors are now locked, and there’s a stock clerk who is responsible for just the maintenance building. All inventory eventually will be bar-coded. And signed carbon-copy requisition forms are needed for anything that comes out of the building.

‘It’s time’

When Maintenance Foreman Mike Ferraro and the district started taking stock of what it had, they found thousands of dollars in new and unused equipment that literally was forgotten about.

Take the $13,800 worth of gym safety matting and volleyball net stands that sat unused for no-one-knows how long in the vacant Wetmore Elementary School.

“They were still wrapped in plastic, but they were buried in the basement,” Ferraro said.

Also in that building, he found 12 new motorized movie screens, like you’d see in an auditorium, still in their boxes.

Page 2 of 3 - “There was just a lot of stuff that was part of past projects that wasn’t installed, and I don’t know why,” Ferraro said.

In the warehouse, workers found 100 new chairs, each worth about $100. They also found 40 new dry-erase boards, worth about $40 a piece.

School board Vice President Louis LaPolla said disorganization has long been a problem in the district.

“There was a lack of inventory, and this is what came up at board meetings many times,” he said. “There were times there were missing snow blowers and missing tools.”

In the past, he said, the wrong people were in the wrong jobs.

Past superintendents “did not have the proper individuals in place to ensure control over inventory,” LaPolla said. “It’s time everything is on the books and nothing is done without a policy.”

Superintendent James Willis credited Joseph Muller II, director of district operations and safety for the new controls.

“It’s just better management, that’s what it is,” Willis said. “We just didn’t have a complete inventory plan before.”

Selling unneeded items

The inside of the warehouse is in the middle of a renovation. What was once a big empty space, broken up by shelves to divide workspaces, now has walls and fresh paint. All the work was done by shop employees, to save money, and many of the materials came from reclaimed or scavenged materials.

There are new whiteboards everywhere. The drop ceilings and lighting were recycled from the Conkling school, which is being gut-renovated from the administration building back into an elementary school as part of the district’s $187.6 capital project.

“Once the administration moved out,” said Ferraro, “we had two weeks to empty the building.”

The other schools sent in wish lists, which were filled.

“We got rid of 90 percent of it to the schools,” Ferraro said.

Slowly, Ferraro and the district have been putting newly discovered items on the public auction site eBay and making money for the district on items that it can’t use anymore.

“This is my eBay stack,” said Ferraro, standing in the warehouse portion of the building.

At one end are four perfectly usable commercial deep fryers that the district stopped using because, for health reasons, it bakes everything it used to fry.

“We had some big three-phase industrial band saws,” Ferraro said about the equipment the district couldn’t use because it didn’t have up-to-date safety measures built in.

So far about 15 items were auctioned off, netting the district about $2,500.

That doesn’t count the scores of 55-gallon drums filled with scrap metal, like bits of old copper wire or pipes saved from repair jobs. If the metals are separated, one trash can full of copper bits is worth up to $900.

Page 3 of 3 - Standing between rows of shelves in the warehouse, Ferraro and Salatino said it used to look a lot different.

“There was at least 40 years of junk in here,” Salatino said. “It was just easier to save it and throw it down in the shop.”

Besides getting organized, Ferraro said the life of the shop has changed for the better.

“Not to disrespect the people who were here before, but we’ve changed the culture,” he said. “I’m running it like a business and not a school district.”